Men’s Laws

“44 Inch Chest” and “Police, Adjective.”

The new British movie “44 Inch Chest” is a very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way. Five of the best actors in England have been handed a ranting, foulmouthed script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the same vituperative pair who wrote the wonderful “Sexy Beast,” in 2000. As in that movie, the actor Ray Winstone is the loving husband at the center of the story—here a Londoner named Colin Diamond. An emotional bloke, tending toward corpulence, Colin comes home one night with flowers for his wife of twenty-one years, Liz (Joanne Whalley), only to be told coolly that the marriage is over—she has met someone else. He’s crazy about her, or so he says, and after the initial shock he demands to know the name of her lover. Then he begins clobbering her. Crashing through a window, she barely escapes with her life.

All this is seen in flashback. The movie begins with Colin’s best friend, Archie (Tom Wilkinson), finding him lying amid the wreckage of his living room after the fight. Archie quickly assembles the rest of Colin’s mates: Meredith (Ian McShane), a swank, cynical gay man, dressed in black; Mal (Stephen Dillane), a lethally violent, incomprehensibly bitter type; and Old Man Peanut (John Hurt), a harsh, guttural senior who seems to be suffering from gout, even if he isn’t. This surly gang of four crashes into a French restaurant, hauls out a young waiter (Melvil Poupaud), and takes him to a safe house, where he is locked in a wardrobe, then pulled out and made to sit down, hands tied, hooded, like a torture victim, in the middle of a featureless room. Only at the safe house do we find out that he is Liz’s lover, and why Colin is such a mess. The men take turns screaming at the silent Loverboy, as they call him, relying on extensive use of Britain’s favorite four-letter word (not the same as America’s favorite four-letter word). It is the gang’s considered opinion that Colin can reassert his manhood by killing his wife’s boyfriend.

The director, Malcolm Venville, shoots the movie like someone who has spent a lot of time wondering how he could merge Harold Pinter with Quentin Tarantino. The action is all spitting, threatening dialogue. We could be at a single-set play or stuck in the garage in Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.” Colin and his pals are supposed to be deranged misogynists, of course—although the title is perhaps not as much a reference to Jayne Mansfield or some local porn star as a measure of the men’s inflated masculinity. And we’re meant to think that Colin’s friends are concerned far less for his loss of self-esteem than they are for their own, that they want Loverboy to die because they are no longer young or hopeful themselves. Colin will somehow redeem them from failure. Will he commit murder or not? That’s the movie’s only suspense, and the climactic sequence is a long scene in which Colin, alone with Loverboy, tearfully spills out his hatred, regrets, and confusion, while the others linger outside in a hall, telling one another ribald tales of women’s perfidy.

By this time, the audience may well conclude that Colin’s nearly killing his wife suggests not love but loathing, and that neither he nor the other clueless sods are worth much attention to begin with. I would agree with that assessment if I hadn’t enjoyed the acting so much. Winstone, enraged and lachrymose, is often moving in his bafflement over rejection, a torment for which there is no solace. Hurt turns his mouth into a shark’s grin, his body into a gnarled hickory stick. Dillane alters the rhythm and color of speech in a part that is pure venom. And McShane, stealing the movie, is slyly superior as a man who has never felt love and therefore can’t imagine getting himself into a twist like the rest of them. “44 Inch Chest” is a stunt that has the narrow fascination of a skillful acting exercise. Mellis and Scinto’s pungent script has a manic obsessiveness that sounds like a tirade delivered by a guy sitting at the next barstool. Men can take the madness as a warning, so I guess the picture, straitened as it is, has some therapeutic value.

“Police, Adjective,” the startling and original Romanian film that is slowly making its way around the country, is also a stunt, though of a far more consequential nature. The movie is simultaneously a police procedural, an analysis of language and imagery, a philosophical debate about law and justice, and a very, very dry Romanian Martini—so dry that, at first, one doesn’t quite taste much of anything. Corneliu Porumboiu, the young writer-director (“12:08 East of Bucharest”), shot the movie in his home city of Vaslui, a somnolent place in which the only thing happening (as far as we can see) is the minor crime of hashish possession. Three teen-agers—two boys and a girl—are smoking dope in the courtyard of a local school. The hero, Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a thirtyish plainclothes police detective, utterly dedicated to his job, is unhappy about putting kids away for possession, which isn’t even a crime in nearby European states. Still, he gathers evidence, tracking the three relentlessly in the raw Central European winter, walking up and down underpopulated streets in light that is so even and gray it’s as if all memory of sunshine had been banished. He stakes out the school and a private house, his chin tucked into a pullover that he wears day after day, until his wife complains. At police headquarters, he goes in and out of his drab office, fills out reports, and prevails upon other people to pull files for him, which they do, often with as little grace as possible. We can’t help noticing—as we did during other such works of the New Romanian Cinema as “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days”—a pervasive rudeness and suspiciousness, the malevolent hangover from many years of a police state.

The movie has a doggedly faithful relationship to time. In a lecture given in 1924, “The Concept of Time,” Heidegger, searching for a definition, said that time has no body but is merely a medium in which events take place. Cinema commandeers this neutral quality as brutally as it can, substituting dramatic time for real time. Most directors fill shots with information, and then edit them into briefer and briefer segments, jumping restlessly forward or backward, or cutting between, say, a criminal and a cop and their simultaneous actions. Porumboiu goes in another direction: he wants us to experience the duration of ordinary events. Andy Warhol, with his five-hour movie of a man sleeping and his eight-hour movie of the Empire State Building, was the high and low comic of duration. Great directors like Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman have mounted extended sequences in which the unbroken duration of an event becomes its meaning. They are the dramatic poets of real time, and Porumboiu is among their number. “Police, Adjective” is initially devoted to the mole-like industriousness of police work. In an interview, Porumboiu called his devotion to a man watching and waiting “absurd time.” By normal standards, many scenes, shot from a single fixed-camera position, are weirdly attenuated, and I will admit that I occasionally gave way to multitasking. What other pieces of laundry, I wondered, could go into the washer along with black socks? Did I have enough wine for a dinner party next week?

But then Cristi arrives home, and I snapped out of it. He and his young wife, a teacher, have a comical argument about the lyrics of a banal pop song that she is listening to, over and over, on YouTube. He’s enraged by the sentiment that life without love is “like the sea without the sun.” What could this mean? It’s an image, she says. He wants to know why people can’t stick to literal meanings. The sea is still the sea. He hears the repeated line, “Life goes forward,” which prompts him, exasperated, to ask, “Can it go backward?” Well, no, it can’t, as this poker-faced movie clearly demonstrates.

Cristi is a literalist; he has no use for metaphor. He wants more evidence, the source of the drugs—one of the kids’ relatives may be bringing them in from Italy. Isn’t that the real crime? Cristi is in trouble, officially and spiritually; he doesn’t feel right upholding a law that he believes to be Draconian. The debates about language and conscience reach a sinister pitch. He’s called into the office of his captain, an intellectual sadist who puts him on the spot, asking him the meaning of words like “conscience,” “police,” and “law.” Fear mounts slowly during the examination, as Cristi is forced to read dictionary definitions of these words aloud. The captain trips him up on the literal meanings and “proves” to him that he isn’t doing his duty. For Cristi, this is an ironic moral defeat—his best, truest, most generous impulses about justice are crushed by authoritarian habits that, embedded in language, remain as strong in the new Romania as they were in the old. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.